With the closing of a Blockbuster store in Australia, the one in Bend, Ore., will be the last to survive changes in technology and shopping that reshaped the way people watch movies at home.
Fifteen years ago, a movie fan could go into any of Blockbuster’s 9,000 stores and walk out with a Steven Spielberg hit.
Now, options are limited for those who want to rent a hard copy of “Saving Private Ryan” from somewhere other than a library. There are only two Blockbuster stores left in the world. Very soon, there will only be one.
The second-to-last Blockbuster, a squat blue-and-yellow slab wedged next to a real estate agency in Western Australia, will stop renting videos on Thursday and shut down for good at the end of the month. Two stores in Alaska, part of the final group of Blockbuster outlets in the United States, closed in July.
That will make the Blockbuster in Bend, Ore., one of a kind: a corporate remnant, just off the highway, near a cannabis retailer and a pet cremation service.
But this is no elegy for Blockbuster, no lament for how Netflix killed the video star. There were plenty of those when the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010, shriveled to 300 stores and then mostly closed.
This is about the ability of the Bend store, like sturdy links in other dying chains, to live on and avoid being turned into a pawnshop and or a fast-food restaurant.
Some Tower Records stores still thrive in Japan long after their parent company declared bankruptcy and closed all of its American stores.
